A quality website and web presence strategy is critical to the success of a restaurant, and yet so many restaurant websites ignore the needs and requirements of a valuable website and effective digital marketing.

A restaurant website needs to be an extension of the brand, but it also needs to be a driver of foot traffic (customers) to the physical establishment.

It needs to convert visitors to customers, both in the enticement phase (gorgeous photography and descriptors), but also in the technical goal conversion points (reservations, inquiries, click to call, click for directions, social media signup).

It needs a marketing strategy that combines word of mouth and referrals with social media, search engine optimization, local search, and traditional printed marketing.Why mobile-friendly or mobile-first?

For many restaurants, 70%+ of all visitors come to the site on their mobile device or tablet. But not only do they visit the website on their device, but those who are visiting on those smaller devices are ready to walk in the door of your restaurant and/or book a reservation; they are not just casual visitors. Catering to their mobile needs yields you a higher web visitor-to-restaurant-customer conversion.

What is microformatting?Microformats are attributes present in the markup of your pages that grant an explicit deceleration (eg "this is a Blog Post") as to the role of the content present in the document. As their use increases, those sites without the additional information accuracy gained though microformatting may find themselves falling behind in search results and click throughs. A small time investment adding microformatting to your website content may yield large returns to your site and its content strategy.

In the last year Google has increased their focus on using microformatting, and one of the areas has been in microformats for restaurant menus. Read about how we were one of the pioneers in the formation of the menu schema.

Google Local Search optimization?

Through our restaurant local search research we have found that Google's Local Search, and specifically the traffic derived from it via the use of Google My Business listing, can often rival the total traffic coming to your site, if not exceed it. Coupled with the most commonly requested conversions for a restaurant, focusing on Google My Business and Local Search is a good strategy.

Curious how much traffic Google My Business is driving and how you position?

We're going to start with a fact: the click data within GMB isn't the most accurate, and the Insights they provide don't give you enough data about the phrases you're being found for. Our friend Joy Hawkins found a great trick for getting this data: UTM encoded URLs.

Edit your Info in your Google My Business Listing. In the section where you have the URLs to your company, change the URLs to add the following to the end of the URLs:

?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gmb

Your new URL will look like https://www.confluentforms.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gmb

This UTM will enable the traffic to still come into your Analytics as Google Organic Search traffic, but you'll also be able to look in your Campaigns report and see "GMB" to see exactly how much traffic Google My Business is driving to your site.

But there's more!

In a few days, head over to Google Search Console where you've hopefully claimed your site's search console reports. In that report you'll now see the UTM link being displayed as a Page when you toggle to view by Pages (see the above image). If you click into that line item, then toggle back to Queries, you'll then see all of the queries that users used to search and your restaurant was displayed in the local Map pack of results. You'll see clicks, impression volume, click through rate, and position for each of those queries.

The following websites were all developed by Confluent Forms LLC. If you have a hospitality establishment that needs a website, or are looking to improve the business that your website generates for your restaurant or other retail business, please contact us!